Hi folks,
I keep having this fantasy that I will one day make my old Cobalt RaQ
run a Debian system including 64-bit apps. I've got a copy of _See
MIPS Run_ (wonderful book) and a working system based on Cobalt's
hacked-up kernel 2.0.34 and Red Hat 5.x. I am comfortable using
cross-gcc and messing with glibc.
It seems that I have all the information required to do it all myself,
but perhaps I might save a few years of work (or rid myself of this
delusion) by consulting with you all first.
The CPU is a QED RM5231 (CONFIG_NEVADA) 150MHz. May I assume that
nobody has run a 64-bit kernel on this thing? The RaQ has no video
card but a serial console, PCI, IDE, Ethernet, and special LEDs, panel
buttons, and LCD display. If I can get a 64-bit kernel to boot and
prove its existence through any of these devices, I will be drunk with
power.
The reason I want 64 bits is that I (a) want a challenge, (b) plan to
write an application that uses a sparse address space (40 bits is
better than 31), (c) plan to outlive the 31-bit time_t, and (d) am
p.o.ed at having bought the thing based on misleading advertising that
mentioned a 64-bit processor but not the 32-bit OS.
Big/little endian macht nichts. I guess big will be easier, and I'm
not concerned with running any existing 32-bit binaries.
I imagine that I would start by grafting Cobalt's peripheral support
code from arch/mips/cobalt (now defunct) and include/asm-mips/cobalt.h
into the mips64 tree from cvs@oss.sgi.com:/cvs/linux.
I will appreciate your advice.
-John
--
John Tobey, late nite hacker <jtobey@john-edwin-tobey.org>
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]]] With enough bugs, all eyes are shallow. [[[
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